The aim of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of educational software among teachers in Italy (N = 559). The evaluation of usefulness was conducted on the latest and most popular web-based software used by European teachers, namely: Quizizz, Mentimeter, Wakelet, Padlet, Canva, Emaze, Answergarden, Jamboard, Coggle, Createley, Wordwall,…

The transition to distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic uncovered criticalities in the participation of students with special educational needs. The BESt-DaD project responded to these difficulties by developing a user-friendly online platform aimed at accommodating these students' neurocognitive profiles, ultimately promoting inclusion.…

In this note, we analyse the use of gestures and gazes by a group of university lecturers while distance teaching. We investigated the video lessons produced and recorded by 22 lecturers, with the purpose of spotting the presence of signalling behaviours such as glances aimed at drawing the attention to parts of the screen, or pointing gestures,…

Holocaust education, which refers to the teaching and learning of the Holocaust--the systematic genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II--is an essential component of history and social studies education in many countries. Its primary aim is to raise awareness of the Holocaust, promote understanding of…

The role of virtual simulations in the evolution of primary school students' mental models about electrostatics is investigated by analysing the answers of two groups of 9-10 years old pupils inside instructional sequences that combine two hands-on activities using balloons and jackets with the same activities using PhET simulations: one group…

This report describes how entrepreneurship competence is embedded in vocational education and training (VET) in Italy. It complements existing knowledge with examples of methods, tools and approaches that can help policy-makers, VET providers and other stakeholders build better entrepreneurial learning ecosystems. The report is based on the pilot…

This paper deals with the pros and cons in relation to the teaching strategy imposed specifically in Italy by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has involved and continues to involve significant changes in the setting in which students and teachers interact. The approach is multidisciplinary, in that the perspective advanced is both historical and…

This paper proposes a reflection on the evolution of educational technologies and on its impact on school education. Over time, even though with different approaches, methods and tools, educational technology as a field of research has followed substantially two main directions. The first direction has resulted in studies on the new technical and…

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged educators to shift their practices and utilize technology to reach and teach learners at a distance. This study presents data collected in situ from 265 K-12 educators who adapted their practices during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Findings revealed that educators relied on multiple…

In the last year a new virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease caused by it (COVID-19) has quickly spread around the world, leading the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency and, then, a global pandemic status. The strategies adopted by many countries to reduce the impact of the pandemic were mainly based on social distancing…

The information disciplines are rapidly developing and that development brings twofold challenge for library and information science (LIS) education; in terms of delivering the content, and in terms of the content itself. The former means that, as with any other discipline, it needs to implement new technologies and didactic approaches to provide…

In this paper, we pursue a materialist approach to tool use to account for the material dimensions of learning mathematics with technology while decentralizing the human body from activity. We root this vision in theoretical advances on embodied mathematics learning and tool use that have been recently offered as alternatives to traditional…

The focus of this research is how Sicilian state university mathematics professors faced the challenge of teaching via distance education during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic entered our lives suddenly, the professors found themselves having to lecture using an e-learning platform that they had never used before, and…

Humor and fear appeals are widely employed in traditional communication for educational purposes, but their exploitation in animated pedagogical agents has been scarcely explored. We studied the use of humor and fear appeals by a three-dimensional animated pedagogical agent that taught the same procedural knowledge in four conditions: i) humor…

COVID-19 pandemic has created significant changes in higher education institutions. After university lockdown, a transition from face-to-face learning to distance learning was unavoidable and several teachers and students had to approach new technologies. The DELTA (Digital Education for Learning and Teaching Advances) Research Group provided…